Monday, November 23, 2009

In this webcast, Chris Jackson, demonstrates how you can use the Windows 7 Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 to get your application portfolio ready to migrate from a Windows XP to a Windows 7 environment. He shows how to gather an application inventory and mitigate application compatibility issues.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Recently Tonyso posted an interesting article about how to shrink and change a partition size for a vhd file.

There’re a lot of reasons why should be interested in doing something like this, for instance, you may need to reduce the size of a vhd file that was created during a P2V migration, or you may need to reduce the maximum size of a given partition for an old miss configured vhd file with extra unused space, or perhaps you need to consolidate your available storage and for that you need to readjust the existing vhd files to the correct size…

Here’s an interesting one that I already run a couple of times. You try to create a cluster at Hyper-V, the cluster pass all validation tests, then, at the final phase of the cluster creation, the process fails with the following error:An error occurred while creating the cluster. An error occurred creating cluster 'clustername'. The service has not been started.
After this, the cluster computer account is removed from Active Directory!!!

After a closest check, I notice that the problem is related with the “Microsoft Failover Cluster Virtual Adapter” - “This device cannot start. (Code 10)”.

Hum…
After a reboot I saw the following errors at the event log:EventID 4872:
The failover cluster virtual adapter failed to generate a unique MAC address. Either it was unable to find a physical Ethernet adapter from which to generate a unique address or the generated address conflicts with another adapter on this machine. Please run the Validate a Configuration wizard to check your network configuration.
andEventID 4871:
The cluster service failed to start. This was because the failover cluster virtual adapter failed to initialize the miniport adapter. The error code was '2147483674'. Verify that other network adapters are functioning properly and check the device manager for errors. If the configuration was changed, it may be necessary to reinstall the failover clustering feature on this computer.

Okay, something is wrong with the MAC Address creation for the Microsoft Failover Cluster Virtual Adapter. What can we do about that?

Solution:
(Before proceeding, make sure that you backup of your registry)

- Open registry, and navigate to the following registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

- Under this subkey, find the subkey that holds a DriverDesc string value entry whose value is "Microsoft Failover Cluster Virtual Adapter." (NOTE: 007 was the key designated were the Microsoft Failover Cluster Virtual Adapter was in my server, but this number may vary on different servers.)

Repeat these steps for computers were you're having this problem. When you do this on other computers, replace the value data of the registry with different values in order to set a unique value for each node. For example, set the value on the second node to 02-AA-BB-CC-DD-02, and set value on the third node to 02-AA-BB-CC-DD-03. If you notice this behavior on distinct clusters, make sure that you use an address for each node that is unique across all clusters.

Recently, Microsoft has released the KB973838 that describes the same issue.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 allows employees to safely and productively use the Internet without worrying about malware and other threats. It provides multiple protection capabilities including URL filtering*, antimalware inspection*, intrusion prevention, application- and network-layer firewall, and HTTP/HTTPS inspection – that are integrated into a unified, easy to manage gateway, reducing the cost and complexity of Web security. Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 is available for download in both Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition.

Exchange Server 2010 helps you reduce costs by addressing common infrastructure requirements such as backup, e-mail archiving, mobile e-mail access, and voice mail with no need for third-party tools.

Simplified high availability and disaster recovery

Exchange Server 2010 introduces a simplified approach to high availability and disaster recovery to help you achieve new levels of reliability and reduce the complexity of delivering business continuity.

Easier administration and decreased dependence on the help desk

Exchange Server 2010 provides new self-service capabilities to help users perform common tasks without calling the help desk.

Greater mobility and flexible access

Exchange Server 2010 offers an enhanced universal inbox experience, which provides your users with access to all of their business communications from a single location.

Decreased inbox overload and increased productivity

Exchange Server 2010 adds new productivity features which help your users organize and prioritize the communications in their inboxes efficiently.

Transformed voice mail

With Exchange Server 2010, users can receive their voice mail messages in their inbox with text preview.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

In Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V R2, when a running or a saved state virtual machine is migrated to another server, the destination server may have a processor with a different set of features. An operating system or application that attempts to execute CPU features discovered when the virtual machine was started on a "source" machine, but not present on the destination (called "destination") machine, will cause a virtual machine migration failure.

The Hyper-V R2 virtualization platform prevents the migration of a virtual machine that will fail in this way because the processors of the "source" and "destination" servers are not compatible. However, this check for compatibility only happens at the time of virtual machine migration, not when the server joins a cluster.

Windows Server 2008 R2 includes a capability called “Processor compatibility mode” so that you can avoid the situation where virtual machines cannot be migrated due to processor incompatibilities. However, if you do not want to turn this capability on for each of your virtual machines, you can use this wizard to identify which machines in your environment are compatible.

Every day this week long-time Springboard technical contributor and Windows deployment insider, Jeremy Chapman, will post a blog about how to think about Windows 7 deployment projects. We debated on making this a whitepaper or a feature article, but to keep things less formal, we went with a multimedia blog series. This series won't just cover steps to publish images in your Windows Deployment Services environments, instead it goes much broader into the major steps of deployment all-up; from figuring out what applications and hardware you have to migrating files, managing applications, building images, incorporating drivers and automating stuff end-to-end. Jeremy has been a veteran member of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit team and while he won't be posting the classic "1500 pages" of how-to content, he will stay on his quest for the elusive and often escalated-for "one-page paper" to migrate enterprise customers from Windows XP to Windows 7. Let's see if he can do it!

Back In October SysInternals gave us the Disk2vhd v1.1 (and I already used some times with excellent results) the announcement was made here at ENIACK, now SysInternals is back with the new version of the same tool “v1.3”.

The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted).
DOWNLOAD IT NOW HERE!!!

According with MS Exchange Team Blog, Exchange 2007 will be supported on Windows Server 2008 R2.

“We always talk about listening to customers and sometimes this is written off by many as 'marketing speak'. In fact, we do take feedback seriously and no input is more important to our engineering processes than your voice.”“Earlier this year we made a decision in one direction, and due to the feedback we have received on this blog and elsewhere, we have reconsidered. In the coming calendar year we will issue an update for Exchange 2007 enabling full support of Windows Server 2008 R2. We heard from many customers that this was important for streamlining their operations and reducing administrative challenges, so we have changed course and will add R2 support. We are still working through the specifics and will let you know once we have more to share on the timing of this update.“

TRUE, Microsoft Learning and MS Press folks have this eBOOK available for download here.

Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 will help you to understand the new R2's features, capabilities including the improvements in Hyper-V, RDS virtualization, IIS the Web application platform and other interesting stuff.

975830
The memory usage of the Dns.exe process keeps increasing after you install hotfix 941672 on a computer that is running Windows Server 2003 SP2 and that has the DNS server role installed972622
The Active Directory Application Mode index may become corrupted if you search the instance by using the LDAP virtual list view control975792
Numeric host names cannot be resolved on a computer that is running Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008969371
Error message when you run a command at the Command Prompt window in Windows Server 2008 Server Core: "The specified service does not exist as an installed Service"975943
Error code when an application uses the CredSSP if the authenticated user account is a member of many security groups on a computer that is running Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008: "0x80090329"976921
A DFSR propagation report logs the following error on a Windows Server 2008 domain controller: "Cannot open test file on the member The network path was not found."976922
The "Run only allowed Windows applications" Group Policy setting displays no entries on a computer that is running Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, or Windows 7968929
Description of the Windows Management Framework on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008974522
A LDAP simple bind action fails on a domain controller that is running Windows Server 2008 if the distinguished name of the user account exceeds 256 characters976427
Computers that are running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 stop responding at a black screen if a screen saver is enabled977110
How to select time zone for countries or regions that are not listed in Windows time zone list